Steam is a ticking time bomb
Steam is a ticking time bomb
The 'enshittification' of the Steam games platform is inevitable, and there are already warning signs.
One extremely important factor that this article neglects to address: Valve is a private company - it's not publicly traded in Wall Street. That is the reason Steam has remained the best in the business; it's not beholden to shareholders' short-sighted meddling. It's also the reason Steam is effectively immune to enshittification.
The unspoken part is that unless Gabe has a very strong plan involving some sort of employee co-op, when he retires or dies the company will likely get sold by the estate to private capital which is 100x worse than being a public company.
Maybe Gaben will go all Willy Wonka when the time comes
Valve has avoided many of the same anti-consumer moves as other tech and gaming giants, likely due to its smaller size, status as a non-public company, and the long-time leadership of Gabe Newell and other executives. Valve won't stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism, and there are already examples of anti-consumer behavior.
Valve is not immune to enshittification, and it has already happened on some level with minimal current Mac support, facilitating gambling through item trades, etc.
Who is trying to game on a mac? Their hardware blows for gaming.
Apple has never wanted to play ball with the gaming community either, look no further than the lawsuits Epic is waging on them over the app store. Apple loves their closed ecosystem, and giving Valve any room for a foothold is counter to their strategy. There is no incentive for apple to court getting steam on their machines, and with such a small player base valve has no incentive either.
When it comes to enshittification Valve is a shining beacon resisting the tide of trends. No paying for online play. Free cloud saves. An open ecosystem with marketing methods that give everyone a chance in the spotlight, regardless of AAA status. No exclusivity for games (Epic can fucking suck it for bringing that bullshit to PC). Instead of squashing competition with shit business practices like Epic and Apple they encourage competition! They purposefully made SteamOS open source so that other companies can easily release portable PC gaming products!! They created controller compatibility when Microsoft wouldn’t, notably for playstation controllers while still releasing their own Steam controller. They created one of the first and only digital goods return policies, and frequently accept returns beyond the time limit. No one else in this industry is doing things like that. Epic wants to break in with subversive tactics while Valve is continuously improving the landscape for gamers, developers, and hardware makers. As long as Gabe Newell is alive we are in safe hands.
That said, who knows what happens when he dies? Everything is still just a license, so check out GOG for DRM free goods while you can. Buy things on other stores when they’re cheap so you have a distributed library. Maybe the ticking time bomb is there, but for the moment Valve is the last gaming company that isnt trying to fuck us on a daily basis, and I will continue to support that as long as that remains true.
When Valve makes a change to Steam that you disagree with your choice is to give up using Steam, and your purchased games, or just accept it and continue. Steam is proprietary software: it gives unjust power over user's computing. Even good people are not immune to the temptation to use power for themselves at the expense of others. While Valve have done a lot of good, indeed are the best, no one is perfect. I don't understand why you think it has no potential to become a lot worse.
I do hope to see more competition in the Linux gaming space. It's not good long term to fully rely on Valve for everything.
Its the “if you build it they will come” type of scenario. I want to switch to Linux really badly, but my driver is for gaming, i don’t want to adopt a pet project of getting my games to run in the first place.
Though i know valves interest in Linux is not completely motivated in philanthropy. They want to be able to separate from the dependence of Microsoft, for the safety of their businesses future. But so far our interests align
The article makes some good points. Most people downvoting it probably just see a title that attacks their favourite game distribution platform, if there even is such a thing.
Personally, I treat Steam like a rental service, because that's what it is. Meaning I exclusively "buy" games on Steam at deep 80-90% discounts. So, when the enshittification inevitably hits the fan, I can jump ship without feeling like I'm loosing too much.
I'll just link this reply. They lost me when they said "The lock-in effect with Steam is so great that [Epic] giving games away for free is not putting a sizable dent in Valve's dominance."
It doesn't matter that Epic is giving away games that only run on a platform I don't use. They won't get my money until they get their heads out of their asses about Linux.
EDIT: Yeah the link says pretty much the same things (and more) than I did below.
I think it says more about Epic's launcher and sales tactics than about Valve's dominance. I mean, up to a certain point you can compensate your inferior product with a lower price point but if the trade-off is too high, then even giving something out for free doesn't help. Epic's launcher has been quite bad without any clear development in my eyes for a long time, and I can as well relate to the other commenter about not being able to use it natively on Linux. It's just not something worth a few saved euros to put up with.
I do wonder what's the Steam users' demography nowadays. Are there so many adults who earn a decent salary that they can afford actually paying for their games and enjoy a working platform (Steam) instead of saving a buck and losing their hair on the rare occasion they have the time to play something? That can be a tough crowd to lure in with some occasional free games.
My primary complaint with Steam is the quality of the games.
I've had a Steam account now for... let's see here... 19 years:
Being primarily a console gamer, I rarely used it until I bought a Steam Deck. Then I went looking for Steam exclusive games I couldn't otherwise play on my Xbox Series X, PS5, Nintendo Switch...
What I found was a lot of garbage porn games, and a lot of garbage anime games, and a lot of garbage anime porn games.
It's super difficult finding something worth while to play. So it's not a surprise to me to see that the #1 game is eight years old:
What I found was a lot of garbage porn games, and a lot of garbage anime games, and a lot of garbage anime porn games.
Dang that sucks. Sorry you couldn't find a porn game you liked.
🤭
You know the marketing brainwashing works, when people go look for exclusive games :D
Super easy, Steam has PC games that I can't play because I don't have a PC. Hence the Steam Deck. ;)
You were surprised that indie-darling, continuously updated, save-synced, casual game Stardew Valley is the #1 game on the Steam Deck? To begin with, that doesn't speak for popularity on Steam overall, and do I really need to go on?...